Some cookbooks inspire readers to hit the kitchen and prepare something great. Others inspire them to surrender and call for takeout Chinese. Take a guess as to which “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is. The $625 tome, one of the most thorough and jaw-droppingly intricate food books ever published, aims to be nothing less than the bible of molecular gastronomy. At six volumes, 2,438 pages and some 50 pounds, you’ll need two people to lift it — and quite a few more if you plan on cooking anything in it.

Its techniques are the stuff of the far-out culinary science made famous in such restaurants as Spain’s elBulli, England’s Fat Duck and Clinton Street’s wd-50. These places are less like kitchens and more like labs, deploying liquid nitrogen, $1,000 sous vide machines, rotary evaporators and vacuum centrifuges to put food on the table.

The book, out March 14, was conceived and edited by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive who compiled cooking techniques, ingredient properties and the physics behind food preparation. (Diverse chapter headings include “How Muscle Works,” “Flavor Infusion Into Fats” and “Transglutaminase Gels.”)

And then there are the recipes. Like most everything in the book, they’re cutting-edge and obsessively detailed — as well as nearly impossible for normal cooks to prepare.

In the name of science, The Post set out to make one of the book’s key recipes: a mushroom Swiss burger. Despite the deceptively simple title, it’s a Dr. Frankenstein take on a hamburger that takes 30 hours to prepare — two hours longer than last week’s Oscars ceremony.

We asked the expert chefs at SoHo’s French Culinary Institute to lend us their kitchen and expertise.

Because this is “Modernist Cuisine,” it obviously requires more than just dropping by your local Associated and picking up something in a Styrofoam tray. Instead, Potanovich assembles a blend of dry-aged rib-eye steak (for flavor), hangar steak and short ribs (for texture). It’s seasoned with salt and pepper, then cooled by pouring liquid nitrogen over it. Cold meat grinds better because the fats don’t break down due to heat. You could also just chill the meat in the freezer, but, as Potanovich says, liquid nitrogen is just more awesome.

As the meat is fed into a grinder, the extruded ropes of ground beef are kept parallel, like a bundle of twigs. The recipe calls this “vertically align[ing] the grain.” The key is to manipulate the meat as little as possible, which keeps it tender.

The patties will be cooked by a method called sous vide. The meat is vacuum-sealed in a plastic bag, then submerged in 133-degree water, where it will cook slowly for a long, long, long time. Thirty hours, to be exact. Probably not a good idea for dinner parties, but sous vide cooks the meat evenly.

The veggies

“Now it’s time to smoke the lettuce,” Potanovich announces. This is probably the first and last time this sentence has ever been uttered.

A slice of iceberg lettuce is submerged in a bath of cold water seasoned with a couple drops of liquid smoke (available at your local grocery). Then it’s put into a vacuum machine, which looks like a tiny silver coffin.

As the air is sucked out of the machine, the lettuce absorbs the solution, giving it a smoky flavor but preserving the leaf’s crisp texture. “It’s pretty ingenious,” Potanovich says.

Simply slicing a tomato for your burger would be far too boring (and easy), so slices are seasoned with salt and olive oil, then “compressed” in the vacuum machine. As with the lettuce, the vacuuming process improves the tomato’s flavor while preserving its texture.

The cheese

For the cheese, a wild take on American singles, a mix of grated Emmental and Comte is heated in a pan with wheat ale — as well as two ingredients home cooks will have trouble laying their hands on, carrageenan and sodium citrate, which act as thickening agents.

The hot, liquid mixture is poured into cylindrical molds, then cooled in the fridge. So why not just put a slice of regular Emmental cheese on the burger, instead of going to all this trouble?

“It’s a novelty,” Potanovich says. “I think they just wanted a perfect bun-sized slice of cheese.”

The condiments

The burger is also topped with a homemade mushroom-ketchup, seasoned with fish sauce and horseradish.

The next topping is so surprisingly straightforward, you wonder if there’s been some mistake. Slices of maitake mushroom are sauteed in a little oil. And that’s it. No machinery or NASA tech required.

With such a high-maintenance burger — Potanovich estimates it would cost $60 in a restaurant because of the labor — the question is what to serve on the side. “Modernist Cuisine” suggests French fries. Only these are prepared with a vacuum sealer and an ultrasonic water bath. Naturally.